Thursday, July 10, 2014

Standing tall amongst foes

India's
greatest son of our times, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive, when I was
a school boy, though I never had an opportunity to see him even from
a distance. Those were the formative years of the independent India
and he was still a Congress party leader. He had not become father of
the nation as yet and school text books did not have anything much
about him. I read about the life and times of this great man later
and developed a feeling of utmost respect towards this remarkable
man. Even then, many small incidences from his life remained hidden
from laymen like me.

In
1982, came a film- an Indo-British venture- directed by famous
director Richard Attenborough, on this great man. I must confess
that I realised the true greatness of this man as I watched this
film. In the later years, I did read few of his books and also books
written about him. I have a firm conviction since then that India has
been extremely lucky to have a leader like him at the right time and
he was principally responsible to win freedom for India.

Indians
might revere mahatma Gandhi, but there was a British leader during
his life time, who was his biggest foe and one-time nemesis. He was
none other than the British wartime prime minister Sir Winston
Churchill, who once said, he hoped Gandhi would die from fasting and
famously derided him as a “half-naked fakir”. Churchill no doubt
was a great leader in his own capacity and had won the second world
war for England. However, he was a true colonialist and believed that
British colonies spread all over the world, should remain like
that-just colonies- in future too, for the benefit of England.

Leaving
aside Churchill's colonial opinion, I have a great respect for him as
he was a true statesman. I made it a point therefore to visit his
statue in the Parliament square in Westminster district of central
London in 1975, when I visited England for the first time. This 12
feet tall bronze statue no doubt is very impressive. On the lighter
side, it is located exactly on a spot referred to by Churchill
himself in 1950's when he had said: "where my statue will go".
The statue was unveiled by Churchill's widow, Lady Clementine
Spencer-Churchill in 1973, just two years before I had visited it. It
was considered as such a great occasion that the the unveiling was
attended by the serving Prime Minister of UK then and four former
Prime Ministers, while Queen Elizabeth II gave a speech.

However,
besides Churchill's statue, there are seven more statues on the
central green of Parliament Square, all of well-known statesmen. Only
one another statue standing there is of interest to our subject, as
it belongs to Jan Smuts, a leader of South Africa in the early 20th
century who favoured racial segregation amongst blacks, whites and
Indians.

I am
tempted to mention here a scene from the 1982 film, Gandhi that shows
a meeting taking place between 24 year old Mahatma Gandhi and Jan
Smuts. Gandhi had started a nonviolent protest campaign for the
rights of all Indians in South Africa in 1893, after having been
thrown off a South African train for being an Indian sitting in a
first-class compartment, despite having a first-class ticket. As a
result, Gandhi was jailed by Smuts’ government for his campaigning
for the rights of downtrodden Indians, a forerunner to his more
famous fight at home that would strike fear into successive British
governments until independence in 1947. In this meeting the film
shows General Smuts reluctantly agreeing to cancel the new laws and
free the protesters. It also becomes very clear that Jan Smuts hated
this young Indian leader.

It is
a kind of ironic that the same Mahatma Gandhi, who started nonviolent
protests against Jan Smut and who also led efforts to end British
rule in India and was repeatedly imprisoned, is to be honoured with a
statue outside the UK parliament greens, where it will rub shoulders
with the two leaders who hated him most, Winston Churchill and Jan
Smuts.

British
Finance Minister George Osborne, on a trip to India to meet the new
government of Narendra Modi, has tweeted that Britain would honour
the memory of Mahatma Gandhi with a statue in London's Parliament
Square. British Foreign Secretary William Hague in a meeting with
India's foreign affairs minister also made a mention of this and
described Mahatma Gandhi as a towering inspiration and a source of
strength.

It is
interesting to note that the Gandhi statue follows a pattern of
Britain reviving and appearing to atone for its colonial past in
India during visits by senior figures. Only last year, Prime Minister
David Cameron had visited the site of a notorious massacre in 1919
when troops under British control had gunned down hundreds of unarmed
protesters and had described the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in the
city of Amritsar as shameful.

As an
Indian I feel happy that a statue of the Mahatma would now stand in
London's Parliament square no doubt but I am more amused to see how
history repeats itself. In the sixteenth century, trade
representatives of Britain had similarly met the Mughal emperor in
Delhi with a request that they may be allowed to establish trading
posts in India, or in the seventeenth century British ambassador had
approached great Maratha king, Shivaji Maharaj with a similar
request. The times are different and so is the context. Yet the
similarities remain and are obvious.